Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

We will see an increasing number of people changing their positions on global warming as the global warming ship sinks. It will take various forms including; articles appearing that subtly shift previously held positions; reevaluation of data; or finding new evidence that allows a change and perhaps worst of all those who say they knew the science was wrong all along but did not consider it important to speak out; dredging up a sentence or two from their writings that they claim showed they knew. The level of inventiveness will astonish as rats desert the sinking ship. Continue Reading →

Dr Russel Norman, ex-MP, will be tried for interfering with the operation of the Amazon Warrior in an oil exploration protest off the east coast of the North Island. Judge Nevin Dawson set the trial date for April next year. Serves Norman right, of course, after Dawson J last June offered diversion to the three defendants and they refused it. Tough. Continue Reading →

GWPF newsletter – republished by permissionThe GWPF newsletter is essential for keeping up with developments in climate change. This edition reveals that by rejecting agreements that would cripple its electric power supply, Australia supports a wave of realism that is transforming climate policy around the world. We learn about Norwegian voters’ rejection of the Greens’ campaign to abandon oil and gas exploration and phase out the Norwegian oil industry in 15 years, and hear yet more evidence that climate fluctuations over the last 100 years invalidate the current alarm. — RT

Borrowed from WUWT – republished with gratitudeIssuing directives “banning” perfectly legal products, like petrol-powered vehicles, is economically, socially and politically unwise. Politicians of a dictatorial bent are well advised to avoid it and leave such decisions to the instincts of a free market. Our friend Dr Mike Kelly tells us it takes, on average, about forty years for the infrastructure to support a new technology to thoroughly permeate through a country. For example, petrol stations, repair workshops, electricity distribution, airports, and so on. If all-electric cars become compulsory before charging stations are available, there will be trouble, as Eric Worrall discusses in relation to hurricanes. — RT

Imagine Escaping a Hurricane in a Tesla

Image from Tesla’s websiteGuest essay by Eric Worrall

First I want to make it clear that I think Tesla responded to Hurricane Irma with exemplary good faith, sacrificing their future profits to send drivers of cheaper Tesla models a free range upgrade, to help them escape Hurricane Irma. But the urgent Florida hurricane evacuation may have inadvertently highlighted an unexpected and potentially catastrophic risk associated with government policies which seek to switch drivers to electric vehicles.Continue Reading →

GWPF newsletter – republished by permissionThe GWPF newsletter is compulsory reading for those wanting to understand climate change. The latest version of WordPress provides an insanely simple way to keep the illustrations intact and I hope you read it with delight. — RT

GWPF newsletter – republished by permissionThe GWPF newsletter is a must-read for anyone wanting an objective analysis of climate change news. The illustrations have been removed and longer extracts shortened but links to the full posts have been retained. I hope you peruse it with pleasure. — RT

Beyond Hurricane Hype:

A Reality Check

Hurricane Irma Comes 7th In List Of Landfalling U.S. Hurricanes

While this won’t be of much comfort for those that are squarely in it’s path right now, it is a small bit of good news. Dr. Philip Klotzbach has compiled rankings of both hurricane Irma and Harvey when they made landfall. Compared to the 1935 Labor Day storm, Irma is a distant 7th, tied with the 1928 Lake Okeechobee storm. –Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That, 10 September 2017

I went looking for the freshest image of Irma. NOAA posted this geocolour image of Hurricanes Irma and Jose from GOES-16 “on the evening” of September 9, 2017. Since I’m posting it about 3.00 pm Sunday, NZT, current Florida time is 11.00 pm Saturday, and evening might be, say, 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm, it sounds as though the pic was snapped up to about five hours previously. Continue Reading →

The Global Warming Policy Foundation is chaired by Lord Lawson and managed by Dr Benny Peiser, a man of seemingly boundless energy. They have a long list of scientists and other experts to call on for advice. The GWPF newsletter is a high-quality round-up of the mos significant climate-related news and a dependable source of scientific information with informed, level-headed analysis on a range of climate change topics covering science, policy, energy and economics.

Like many readers, I find the GWPF newsletter tremendously informative and often read it from cover to cover. It deserves the widest possible distribution. Here is the latest edition: the longer extracts have been shortened but the links retained, including one where you can sign up for your own copy.

Republishing should introduce it to even more New Zealanders and encourage discussion. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. — RT

Pacific Ocean Cools Rapidly

La Nina Threatens Early Return

South Africa Set For Biggest Maize Crop Harvest On Record

Forecasts for an El Nino this winter have given way to the prospect of more La Nina-like conditions as sea surface temperatures in the central-eastern Pacific cool rapidly. Surface temperatures in the critical area of the Pacific have fallen to 0.2 degrees Celsius below average, down from 0.7 degrees above average in the week centred on June 28. The rapid cooling has forced meteorologists to reassess the outlook for the northern hemisphere winter. —John Kemp, Reuters, 5 September 2017

South Africa is set for its biggest maize crop harvest on record following improved weather conditions. At least 16.4 million tonnes of maize can be expected from the maize belt this season. Almost 60 percent of the yield will be white maize, which is the regional staple used for human consumption. —The South Africa, 1 September 2017

In 2015, a vicious El Niño weather pattern swept across southern Africa. When it intensified the following year, it caused severe droughts and threatened the food security of millions. But in 2017, that trend is set to reverse. South Africa is expecting a 15.63m tonne maize harvest, the highest yield of the crop ever. Now 85 percent of South Africa’s crop is genetically modified, with even Malawian and Zambian farmers taking up higher-yield seeds at a rapid rate. With the surplus, maize prices have dropped some 60 percent since last year. While this is good news for some consumers, for farmers it is making it hard to balance accounts. The solution: look to export the bumper crop. –Charlie Mitchell, This Is Africa, 27 June 2017

Only two years after The Revenge of Gaia

Climate change was so serious a threat, he told the Guardian in 2010, that democracy might have to be ‘put on hold’.

Within two years he’d had a remarkable change of heart. ‘All right, I made a mistake,’ he told the cable channel MSNBC. He still believed —and continues to believe — that manmade carbon dioxide is a problem that needs addressing. But we’ve plenty of time to do something about it before any dangerous effects are felt, and in any case, the cures being advanced by green zealots are often worse than the disease itself.

One of his main bugbears is biomass, such as the woodchips from old oak forests in the US, which are shipped across the Atlantic to be burned for electricity at the Drax power station: ‘This is one of the most monstrous examples of green absurdity that I know of. It’s wicked!’

Largest-ever recorded hurricane 6 Sep (NZT)

Hurricane Irma moved into the Caribbean yesterday, swallowing the outer islands, up to the Virgin Islands. Lined up ahead of it are the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba, with Florida out of the image just to the north.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global methane emissions are responsible for more than 40 per cent of the total warming effect so far of all human activities. … Our livestock sector is making the concentration of methane in the atmosphere higher than it would be otherwise, and this results in the world becoming warmer than it would be otherwise.

Stupefying reversal after all the propaganda

The warmsters have been squawking at us since the IPCC was founded in 1988 for using abundant, affordable hydrocarbons to power engines and to create all kinds of materials, from the ordinary (like tar and ink) to the fantastical (like heart valves and aspirin). They demand we stop drilling anywhere, stop mining anywhere and stop creating affordable products to improve and save lives. But this is blinkered madness oozing from the dystopian IPCC stink-tank.Continue Reading →

What’s to be done about the climate change poison being published at SciBlogs? The only course open to me is to offer as best I can an alternative view of what Peter Griffin and the rest put out. I left these comments at SciBlogs over an hour and a half before presenting them here and I fear they won’t see the light of day, as I noticed several comments this morning from colleagues remain unpublished—only one from Bryan Leyland got through (he’s a member of the RS). Chris de Freitas was generous with his expertise with me over many years and I came to admire his calm strength. May his influence in death continue as real to us and as strong as it was in life. – RT

Professor Stephen Hawking, beloved Cambridge cosmologist, fearless victor over ferociously crippling disease and inspirational investigator of the origin of everything (though not a climate scientist) has powered on his (preferred old model) speech synthesizer in public to parrot the alarmist view of global warming.

Speaking to the BBC to mark his 75th birthday the author of a A Brief History of Time said: “We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible.

“Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”

In filing an application for judicial review she hopes to get the government to pledge an emissions reduction target that is, in her words, both “lawful and rational.” In other words, larger — so the world might be properly saved. Miss Thomson recently described her reasoning at The Spinoff. In her Coal Action article (the web site is broken and doesn’t accept comments), Sarah explains: Continue Reading →

Coming soon after the UK Brexit which rejected the EU green octopus, the US Clexit will encourage Clexit efforts in places like central Europe, Canada and the decaying green swamp-lands in Germany and France. The UK may even get the courage to “cut the green crap”. Continue Reading →

Gigantic wind turbine: engineering nothing short of majestic, but profit-making? Not on your Nelly, they require compliant politicians to authorise fat taxpayer subsidies. They wreck your power grid — as they just did in South Australia — and despoil remote wilderness. It’s time to demolish them.(click to enlarge)

Even after 30 years of huge subsidies, wind power provides about zero energy

No comments from me, just a series of extracts from Matt’s latest blog, wherein his unerring discernment dismantles the case for wind turbines as a cure for the climate endangerment craze. I strongly recommend you read his original piece. You won’t hear this from the world-saving Greens, for these are the facts behind their fantasy. One key fact: Wind turbines (icons for ‘clean’ renewables) are necessarily produced by filthy fossil fuels, largely coal. You read it here first. – RT

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year.’

The Americans on 29 March may quietly have set in train the process that will finally derail the climate change juggernaut. The US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing on Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method. Continue Reading →

Hurricane-force winds tilt slabs of ice, allowing the water beneath to freeze and forming the intriguing icy scales shown here, called “dragon skin” by the poetic. This striking image in a recent story caught my attention and I couldn’t resist adding it. Though I wish we could see the scale of the scales.

Hobart scientist Guy Williams said: “Dragon skin ice is very rare, bizarre, evidence of a darker chaos in the cryospheric realm, not seen in Antarctica since 2007.” So colourful: a “darker chaos.” Wow, I’m impressed. And uneasy. Surely this is caused by man-made climate change. Continue Reading →

Power engineer Bryan Leyland yesterday spearheaded a dramatic new challenge to publish a peer-reviewed paper that proves we’re endangering the climate. For such a paper, Bryan announced he will give a cash prize of $NZD2000. Some of us have pitched in and already raised the prize money to $5000 $6000. Continue Reading →

That’s religion

Crikey! Rachel Stewart admits she lost her rag, but her wrathful polemic is completely out of touch with the real world. Her froth-flecked fulmination is a fine example of a bible-bashing religious rant aimed at sinners. Get the faithful moving: climate change is a mission; all hands on deck. Continue Reading →

Professor Howard C. Hayden, physicist, makes a simple promise: he’ll show us a one-letter proof that the theory of a dangerous human influence on global temperature (DHIGT) is false. Can you fault his logic? – RT

Dr Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a prominent sceptical climate scientist, was virtually mugged on 22 February last year but he’s only just given his first public account of it. I am publishing this account and a transcription of his address because it cries out for justice. Continue Reading →

UPDATE 11 Jan 2017: see below

Look at your published data, NIWA

TVNZ trumpets a record year for temperature in New Zealand and around the world. They seem very pleased, as though it’s a creditable step, or as though the ridiculous argument that humans are causing dangerous global warming has been strengthened. Certainly, their newswriter amplifies the magnification: Continue Reading →

Scandal erupts over UK green energy subsidy

Cost to taxpayer £1 billion – no improvement in climate

A botched green energy scheme that has ignited a political crisis is on course to cost taxpayers more than £1 billion. The Treasury faces the bill after a massive overspend on subsidies encouraging farmers and businesses in Northern Ireland to run eco-friendly power schemes. The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) was supposed to cost £25 million in its first five years but the bill is likely to reach £1.15 billion over 20 years.

May the peace within fill the spaces about you. May the Christmas season ring with the voice of its founding spirit. May that delicate one within be brought to your attention. May your hope for truth refresh your courage, nourish your resolve and govern your compass. May we all hear these words.

Here’s a first for the Herald — they now have an Australian comedian writing their climate alarmist stories. We’ve been laughing at their climate stories for years, but now it’s funnier. This Aussie comic makes mischief with an account of recent anomalously high temperatures in the Arctic, complete with references that explain what’s happening. It’s not actually man-made, but he claims it is and forgets to mention the other explanations. Maybe he thinks we won’t check his references, but we did. Continue Reading →

There’s a lot to write about at the moment, so forgive me if I occasionally ignore important topics. They’ll have another turn in due course.

This is rather a sideshow, but we have the Coal Action Network (CAN) agitating with alarmist zeal against Fonterra to bully them into limiting their carbon dioxide emissions for no practical purpose and I don’t know of anyone who is opposing their stupidity. Let me briefly show how this will make no difference to the climate and will simply impede the efficiency of one of New Zealand’s best companies. Continue Reading →

In July 2016, Professor Tim Naish and Professor James Renwick embarked on a whistle-stop tour of 11 towns and cities giving a public slide presentation they called Ten by Ten: Climate Change (“Ten things you didn’t know about climate change”). Senior scientists with the NZ Climate Science Coalition raised concerns about the accuracy of the material being presented and on 26 August, before the tour was over, they lodged a complaint (pdf, 2 MB) with the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Following discussion about how widely accepted Rhoades, D. A. and Salinger, M. J., Adjustment of temperature and rainfall records for site changes, (1993) is, and thus informs temperature adjustments, I checked at the Wiley Online Library. They record no citations. Here’s a screen shot: Continue Reading →

About thirty years ago we first heard reports that the world was warming. The scientific papers noted that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were the highest recorded in the last 8 million years (or some large number, depending on the study). The language made it seem that CO2 caused the warming, but it seldom said so directly. At first.

We trusted the scientists and as more and more of these papers appeared we slowly came to accept that the planet was warming because of our CO2 emissions. Continue Reading →

An informative model of surface temperatures, winds, areas of rising air, and the thermocline (blue surface) in the tropical Pacific during El Niño, normal, and La Niña conditions. The three major states of ENSO are nothing to do with climate, but are tacked on to whatever is the weather. – RT Source: NOAA/PMEL/TAO Project Office, Dr. Michael J. McPhaden, Director.

The denial is consistent with all that warmist shrieking at the El Nino’s peak. The GWPF Observatory reports: Despite Denial, Global Temperatures Are Dropping Fast. All global temperature data sets (you can see a few of the graphs at that GWPF Observatory link) confirm that global temperature has fallen rapidly in the last few months as the recent El Nino ended. Dr David Whitehouse comments: Continue Reading →

I am pessimistic that Trump will make good on all his promises to change the climate change policies of the US. He won’t be allowed to. He’s already making noises like “I’m examining [the Paris treaty] closely.” He’s surrounded by people who know how things work and they’re now teaching him the facts of life. Shame, but there you go. We’ll have to effect change the hard, old-fashioned way of struggle and slog, work and toil.

The conversation has hijacked perfectly innocent global warming threads, so here’s a non-innocent thread that has already pleaded guilty to having sophisticated knowledge of scandal. So it cannot be harmed.

I’ve just installed a slick new editor for writing comments that gives easy access to formatting, blockquotes, links and some other things. Should make life a bit easier without interfering with the delayed editing—or anything else. Let me know of any questions or problems. Hope you like it.

Cheers,

Richard T.

UPDATE 11:45 am NZDT Friday 4th November

I’ve deactivated the new editor for a while. I’ve now seen what RC is talking about and I haven’t found a solution yet. I’ll keep looking. Thanks for all the feedback! – RT